This is the inaugural volume of a new series of literary hardcovers from North Atlantic Books. This series will collect the important work of writers who have served as major influences upon and contributors to the cultural and psychic milieu from which North Atlantic evolved. A distinguished figure of American letters, whose work and spirit have bridged five decades of creativity, Gerrit Lansing provides a perfect launch for the series with this collected edition of his poetry, which astonishes by the variety of its poetic forms and concerns, lyrical and cosmological. It cannot easily be fitted into niches currently fashionable. Like a "seed growing secretly" (to quote a favorite poet of his, Henry Vaughan), it has influenced the American cultural underground since the late 1950s. Lansing was a friend and associate of generations of creative minds as diverse as the poet Charles Olson and the legendary filmmaker Harry Smith. Poet Robert Kelly notes that "he is the most learned among us, and the most fun." Lansing has patiently fashioned a body of work that ranges from short poems such as "The Heavenly Tree Grows Downward" and "In Northern Earth," from which this collection takes its title, to longer cycles like the alchemical serial poem "The Soluble Forest." With themes at once personal and social, erotic and esoteric, Heavenly Tree, Northern Earth manifests the creative spirit of one of the important unheralded masters of modern poetry.

Maud (English, Simon Fraser U.) offers a narrative account of the life and work of poet Charles Olson, focusing on the poet's lifelong reading material as a basis for understanding his work. Drawing on an annotated listing of his library, as well as his childhood books and poetry by his contemporaries, he links the books to the poet's intellectual and poetic development at each stage of his career. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Poetry, for Jed Rasula, bears traces of our entanglement with our surroundings, and these traces define a collective voice in modern poetry independent of the more specific influences and backgrounds of the poets themselves. In This Compost Rasula surveys both the convictions asserted by American poets and the poetics they develop in their craft, all with an eye toward an emerging ecological worldview. Rasula begins by examining poets associated with Black Mountain College in the 1950s—Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Robert Duncan—and their successors. But This Compost extends to include earlier poets like Robinson Jeffers, Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, Kenneth Rexroth, and Muriel Rukeyser, as well as Clayton Eshleman, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and other contemporary poets. Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson also make appearances. Rasula draws this diverse group of poets together, uncovering how the past is a "compost" fertilizing the present. He looks at the heritage of ancient lore and the legacy of modern history and colonial violence as factors contributing to ecological imperatives in modern poetry. This Compost restores the dialogue between poetic language and the geophysical, biological realm of nature that so much postmodern discourse has sought to silence. It is a fully developed, carefully argued book that deals with an underrepresented element in modern American culture, where the natural world and those who write about it have been greatly neglected in contemporary literary history and theory.

Poetry.

This carefully crafted ebook: "The Greatest Christmas Novels, Short Stories & Poems in One Volume (Illustrated)" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents: Life and Adventures of Santa Claus (L. Frank Baum) Christmas At Sea (Robert Louis Stevenson) The Little City of Hope (F. Marion Crawford) The Gift of the Magi (O. Henry) The First Christmas Of New England (Harriet Beecher Stowe) The Holy Night (Selma Lagerlöf) Christmas in the Olden Time (Walter Scott) Christmas In India (Rudyard Kipling) The Twelve Days of Christmas Silent Night Ring Out, Wild Bells (Alfred Lord Tennyson) Christmas with Grandma Elsie (Martha Finley) Little Lord Fauntleroy (Frances Hodgson Burnett) Anne of Green Gables (Lucy Maud Montgomery) The Christmas Angel (Abbie Farwell Brown) Black Beauty (Anna Sewell) The Christmas Child (Hesba Stretton) Granny's Wonderful Chair (Frances Browne) The Romance of a Christmas Card (Kate Douglas Wiggin) Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame) The Birds' Christmas Carol (Kate Douglas Wiggin) The Wonderful Life - Story of the life and death of our Lord (Hesba Stretton) A Merry Christmas & Other Christmas Stories (Louisa May Alcott) Little Gretchen and the Wooden Shoe (Elizabeth Harrison) A Letter from Santa Claus (Mark Twain) Where Love Is, God Is (Leo Tolstoy) Peter Pan and Wendy (J. M. Barrie) Little Women (Louisa May Alcott) The Wonderful Wizard of OZ (L. Frank Baum) The Christmas Angel (Abbie Farwell Brown) The Tale of Peter Rabbit (Beatrix Potter) Toinette and the Elves (Susan Coolidge) The Heavenly Christmas Tree (Fyodor Dostoevsky) At the Back of the North Wind (George MacDonald) Christmas at Thompson Hall (Anthony Trollope) The Princess and the Goblin (George MacDonald) Thurlow's Christmas Story (John Kendrick Bangs) Christmas Every Day (William Dean Howells) The Lost Word (Henry van Dyke) The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (E. T. A. Hoffmann) The Little Match Girl The Elves and the Shoemaker Mother Holle ...